Last week i tried to install Ubuntu 11.04 and i have a problem i cannot solve.

Mit Grafics Card is an Nvidia 9500GS which worked well with Ubuntu, Compiz and stuff before.

The Problem:

i installed Ubuntu 11.04 from the life cd besides an Windows 7 Home Premium

When i boot up ubuntu everything seems to be right

The logon screen appears

When i log in the screen is black in an interval of less then a second i can see the gui elements (panels, desktop icons etc.. flickering).

The only way i can shutdown the system now is doing it the hardware-way

What i tryied so far (1. Attemp):

i logged into the Safe-Mode which works well

i tryied to install the nvidia properitary drivers through the gui this does not work saying "Can't find a valid source for the driver"

i activated the nvidia driver through the console with jockey which worked. In the gui there was the green dot then

rebooting, trying to log in again Same Problem

What i tryied so far (2. Attemp):

so i rembered that in some versions of ubuntu in the past i had to install fresh nvidia drivers downloaded from their website.

i downloaded the drivers from nvidia

tryied to start them (unfortunately the installation process requires to switch off X Server) which i tried by the way i knew (sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop). Which tells me "Use sudo service gdm stop" or something similar. I tried that without success.

Then i tried to switch to a console without gui by hitting "strg+alt+f1" but this results in eternal black. I can then switch back to the gui through "strg+alt+f7".

So the problem with my second attemp is, that i can't get a console without a gui and i can't install nvidia drivers with the gui ant i can't shutdown the gui while being in the gui (spooky)...

So do you have any ideas, what i did wrong or what i could try to get this fixed again? Maybe its not a Graphics Problem at all and you know better?

Thanks for all the information. i couldn't get the service to stop and also no console windows without gui, but i solved the main problem. For some reason i had to make all updates in the safe mode. After that, i was able to install the NVidia driver through the jockey-gui successfully.

Now i habe a nice 11.04 installation with unitiy and everything working nice.